Thursday, October 07, 2010

No One Has All of X-Plane 10

I commented on this before, but, like the Funniest Joke in the World, no one team member has all of X-Plane 10. We're all working away madly at our own parts, separately. This means that if one of us has code or art that isn't quite ready for prime-time, it hopefully doesn't slow anyone else down too much.

I mention this because I see a lot of commentary on the X-Plane 10 preview pictures where the comment is analyzing a part of the picture that actually isn't X-Plane 10 at all! Those pictures are coming right off of developer machines, and that developer probably has some new stuff and some old stuff. Not only does the developer probably not have everyone else's parts of X-Plane, but that developer probably has everything except his own work turned off or way down to keep sim load time down. I don't fly with 20 AI planes when I work on scenery, and Austin doesn't load full scenery at max res when he works on the flight model.

So when you look at the screenshots, just bear in mind that they are showing one new piece of technology pretty well, and pretty much everything else on screen is going to be hit or miss.

Really nice to follow up x-plane 10 updates. For me, these are the main visual details to focus at at this moment:

Higher quality...*Water*Coastal areas*Higher res airport textures (high prio)*Smarter AI-building algorithms, that also makes "chumps" of forets etc instead of just randomly generating forests on appr locations (see example below, the image ending on "1284152077")*AI-generated rocks/stones where geodata implyes there could be this kind of features (...2008-43-21-51.jpg")

Making use of highres textures for ground and airports -really- makes you feel how little your plane is, cruising around at the airport. The same comes to flying some hundred-thosand feet high, you really get the sense of going x knots.